Returning property and property rights in post-war Kosovo: an ethnography of a transitional judiciary

Doctoral research project, University of Edinburgh and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

The importance of property relations and of the resolution of property disputes in mediating post-conflict transition is a growing field of interest for anthropologists of law. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one of Europe’s focal points of post-conflict transition and institution-building, my PhD research, (provisionally) entitled “Returning property and property rights in post-war Kosovo: an ethnography of a transitional judiciary” analyses the legal mechanisms for the resolution of immoveable property disputes through the eyes of the national and international legal practitioners involved in the property restitution process. These disputes emanate from the 1998-99 war and involve members of the Serbian and Albanian communities of Kosovo. This project is especially relevant and timely as it focuses on an entirely under-researched, ‘hybrid’ quasi-judicial institution, the Kosovo Property Agency (KPA), which is now in the last phase of its mandate. I am, moreover, the only researcher to have been given such complete access to the inner workings of this legal ‘machine’. My research will thus offer substantial contributions to the discipline of legal anthropology by proposing an original analysis of property ‘restitution’, as well as of the role of law and legal practitioners in mediating property relations in a post-conflict, post-socialist, transitional setting.